what is a campaign in google adwords and its advantages

Posted on February 28, 2013July 23, 2016bybarkeep

If you are planning to use Google Adwords for any of your internet marketing, then Campaigns are probably one of the fundamental concepts that you need to understand along with Ad Groups. A Campaign consists of one or more related Ad Groups, which are in turn composed of ads and related keywords.

The Campaigns are usually and should be a collection of related ad groups, though it is not a requirement in the true sense. Each of your campaigns must have a single specific goal. It should not be a generic goal, but a goal based primarily on two things: a specific marketing criteria and a budget you want to spend to achieve the goal.

There are several options and configuration settings that is shared by all the ad groups with in the campaign. The most important ones are

Type: This specifies as to where the ads will be displayed. You can choose that the campaign be run only on the search network or only on the display network or both.

Budget: You can specify a daily budget for your campaign. This option allows you keep the overall budget under check, while allowing you to also allocate appropriate budgets to each of the campaigns.

Targeting: This allows you to target your audiences for the campaign. This includes various different options such as geographical location, language, devices and networks among others.

Creating Campaigns

There is really no right or wrong way in how you will create a campaign. But it pays to think ahead and about your marketing strategy, as to how many campaigns you will need and also how you are going to divide up the campaigns. You can create different campaigns based on any of the marketing criteria that you have. It should be a criteria that is mutually exclusive to the other campaigns in the account.

For example, it can be based on … Seasonal: If you have a business which depends on the seasons, such as yard service or snow removal services, then having a different strategy and thus a different campaign for each of the seasons is not a bad idea. Product/Service based: If you provide multiple services or sell multiple types of products, then a separate campaign each of the product or service type will be a good idea.Audience based: You can also create different campaigns based on your target audience. This can vary based on the demographics such as age, gender or geography. For example, you could have a separate campaign targeted towards men and women for the same product while spending more money on women. Keyword Importance Based: You could even have different campaigns for your best performing keywords and its variations. This can guarantee that your best performing keywords get a minimum budget everyday and not be eaten up by other high cost keywords with low ROI.

The campaigns you create will depend very much on your specific requirements, the product or service you are marketing and the marketing strategy and not mention the budget you are working with. Even similar businesses with identical products will have different budgets and strategy. Remember that there is no single correct way of doing this.

Multiple Campaigns and Advantages

You will invariably create multiple campaigns, if you prefer to keep your marketing scalable and manageable. Having multiple campaigns also have several other advantages. The most important of them is probably Budget Management.

Budget: When you have separate campaigns, you can designate different daily budget to each of your campaigns. This is advantageous in several different ways:

It allows you to designate different budgets based on the criteria that was primarily used to create the campaign, which should also be your main categorization.

It allows you to easily change the marketing budget depending on what is working and what is not, without affecting a whole lot of other campaigns/keywords .

It allows you to designate a specific amount to your best performing campaign that returns the best ROI. This will make sure that some high cost keyword is not going to eat into your budget drastically.

You can pause or delete your campaigns at any time. Keeping the campaigns separated and modular allows you a lot more flexibility in turning parts of your marketing on and off depending your needs and requirements.

In conclusion, you should create your campaign based on the most important criteria of your marketing strategy which could be any one of the factors mentioned above. But then identifying that criteria is the first thing you have to do, before you start creating the campaigns.